Please forgive my ignorance but I am a total newbie to CNC and design.

Up until now I have outsourced my design and CNC requirements for my business to another company. However we have grown enough to be able to warrant buying our own machine which I am extremely excited about. It arrives on the 11th of December so I am trying to get to grips with V carve so I can start innovating new designs for our business.

My initial trouble lies with our current designs which were originally programmed into artcam which our designer has given me in .dwg format on a usb stick. The trouble is when you open them in v carve they are considerably smaller than they should be. Any advice on how I can upscale them accurately? TIA

Do you have the job set to the same units that the DWG file was created in? Imperial/metric.

If that isn't it then if you know the size of what one part should be you can measure that using the measure tool in VCarve and then use the scale tool in VCarve to scale to the percentage you need.

So if a circle on the job should be 1" and its 0.3" when you open it in VCarve you can select all the vectors (Ctrl-A) open the Size tool, enter (1/0.3)*100= in the percentage field (make sure the Link XY) is checked) click apply and the whole job will be scaled by the correct percentage

If you are totally new to all this then the best thing you can do is spend some time working your way through the tutorials, don't cherry pick but start at the beginning & work your way through, download the tutorial files & work alongside the videos rather than just watching A dual monitor set up is handy for this if you have access to one.It won't help you much as far as learning how to design goes but it will teach you how to use the software & answer a lot of the questions you will no doubt have

jonnyashworth wrote:Just a quick thankyou. I have now got the hang of this hopefully all the designs will need upscaling by the same amount with a bit of luck.

I am actually surprised they need to be scaled up at all, or were the design people a different company from the one that was previously doing the cutting for you ? If it were me & I had been designing & cutting I would have just sent them at full size

Not got a lot of experience being sent files for CNC machining but files for large format digital printing are often scaled to reduce the size of files being sent, it's not a random reduction in size as there are industry standards that most companies follow, may be the same with cnc files which would mean that you would always scale up by the same percentage